Ranking In Google By Aligning Content Around Searcher Intent

It has been a while since I heard SEOs talk more in the abstract around how Google is understanding the content on your web pages as a whole, and how that has to align to the searcher intent based on the searcher's query, history and patterns. Google is smarter when it comes to understanding their individuals searchers goals and expectations and thus, Google wants to tailor those search experiences to each and every searcher based on the data they have about them (and they have a lot of data about them).

I believe Marcus Tober from Search Metrics was one of the first to push the concept of writing your content, structuring your site architecture around searcher behavior and intent. I forgot the term he used for it, but he went around the speaking circuit using his ranking factors data to show it is not just about ranking for keywords.

Now I see Justin Briggs, a super technical SEO who gets it, go off on a tweet storm around this or a similar concept. So I wanted to share his tweets:

Rankability continues to be increasingly dependent on searcher intent. Google keeps making incremental adjustments across historically stable SERPs. Impossible to rank if not aligned to their determination of searcher intent, but also gives you an advantage if you can align. 1/3

Important to define goal completion concepts by query types & types of pages Google is ranking. Goes beyond just commercial vs. informational, but can be content type specific: “looking for a robust list," “looking for a process,” or “human curated, not programatic results.” 2/3

This is not only important for new page types, but if you’re seeing softness or the gradual erosion of traffic on historically well-performing page types, it may be an intent alignment issue. Targeting & authority are increasingly losing to searcher intent. 3/3

Sometimes it is good to step back a bit, think about the bigger picture and realign your efforts around the ultimate goal and purpose for your web site. That might help you design your content and structure of your site for your users, which is what Google really wants to rank anyway?